It seems we recently lacked time to update you about the latest events happening in the Be(tm)-thing world. So please find here below some catch-up information for you all (hint: surprise at last item…). ‘Nice day to you all !

Games – My Belgian collegue Begasus updated the look of his web site: zeta-games.com. He tells us also that the SCUMM interpreter (used in games such as Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Day Of The Tentacle and Sam and Max) code has been updated. Nice work Luc. Also did you saw that the SimCity source code has been opened ?

WebKIT progress – both IC0 and haiku-os.it related recent progress made in the webkit port. It can now load pages directly using the network stack (previously only from disk). Andrea Anzani wrote a special image decoder which can make use of our beloved image translators to render images (working for JPG and PNG but not yet for GIF because of animated images not properly handeled by the translator). Also non-ASCII characters can be rendered now. Screen shots to be seen at IC0 and haiku-os.it.

Haiku updates – Simon Taylor posted yesterday a nice recap’ of the CVS activity on the Haiku front. Read the info there bu briefly “Huge stability improvements in the kernel and VM, syscall optimisations, OHCI USB work, an AHCI SATA driver, hotplugging support for devices, USB 2.0 handling for legacy devices, work on partitioning support and DriveSetup, and new features in Kernel Debugging Land.”. Interesting, someone put a search engine online for digging into the Haiku source code. Try it here: http://haiku.it.su.se:8180/source/. Last but not least, Ingo posted a very interesting (but coder-oriented should I say) information about the Kernel Debugger and how to use it in real life. Read that here.

Firefox in Haiku – Also Tigerdog from the Bezilla team was interviewed at haiku-os.pl. He also posted in his blog that Firefox is now running (with some problems tough) on Haiku. Even if there are still crashes and long loading times, haiku being able to run such a elaborated app’ means it has recently acquired a lot more stability wich is also really a great news !

SCaLE 6x – All the information about this event can be found here. Also an interview has been published starring Bruno G. Albuquerque and Jorge Mare, some of the Haiku representatives which should attend and take active part there.

Bluetooth – Today we’ve got a new post from Oliver on the matter. It seems he received some RAM for his development machine which will alow him to continue the work on the BT stack. The USB tranport driver and kit were added to the Haiku source tree and can be built from there. He says he is tailoring the bluetooth server and will commit the source into the tree in a week or so. After that testing should begin. Great !